I have tried icewm couple of times but everytime I get frustrated with tweaking it to a bit more usable.

-Now trying to find firstly how to get that ugly default theme changed from the menu.
-I don't like flashy things in my desktop so I would prefer clock to show only hours and minutes.
-That crappy windows-style start menu. It's faster to write a command than to try find anything from submenus submenu.
-There is no icons in desktop pager to show what programs are running on which desktop.

To menu problem I found a partly solution. Make "quick launch", but instead of making them to start program, make to menu. That way you get more programs to "quick launch" and allmost as fast. Icewm default settings are something awful and before I think it's ready the defaults should been made better, so that you can use it for a while before tweaking. Fast and lightweight indeed anyway and quite configurable. I have replaced openbox with icewm in couple of systems when using lxde-desktop.

I have been using fvwm-crystal for some time and there is couple of great innovations what I just can't find in any other window manager. One of the greatest are a really nice quick launch: with left mouse button you open a submenu of that program category. Right mouse button quick launches categorys default program. Like with left button you open internet category and right runs a browser. Really neat. Otherwise it's just fvwm with quite nice default settings. Just problem came with virtual desktops which arent really virtual deskop by xorg definition. They are just different cordinates and relativities and some programs remember their cordinates where they are closed. Nice when program remembers that it was closed in 15000x,10y and next time starts in that non existing position(or virtual)

Cut and paste doesn't seem to work in IceWm. Any hints or tips on how to turn it on?

Also, does anyone have a download link to the fake95 theme? I'm building a gentoo installation to replace a crashed WinME (the champion crashing machine) on an old Compaq Pentium3 box.

Icewm would seem to be the best choice for memory footprint and familiarity to a Windows user. I'm using Gnome on my machine, but unless you have Gigs of memory and a dual core (which I do), it doesn't seem to be the choice.

The first gives you the benefits of Clearlooks window frames (easy on the eyes, compact, modern enough in appearance, ) without having to use Metacity.

The second is the only Run dialog I've ever found which is lightweight yet as flexible and feature-rich as IceWM itself. (Tab completion, history, URL and extension-based launcher associations, and more)

The third lets you reference the vast majority of application icons using the same concise, relative syntax you'd use with x11-themes/iceicons or inside /usr/share/applications/*.desktop

EDIT: Oops. Almost forgot the best part. x11-misc/pcmanfm will give you a file manager with a lot to recommend it:

It looks and feels like Thunar (familiar and comfortable)

Unlike Thunar and Nautilus, it has a tabbed UI (Big reason I used to use Konqueror 3.x on desktops like GNOME and Xfce while experimenting)

Despite being a GTK+ 2.x app, its GUI is more responsive than Xfe's (feels more lightweight despite not being ugly and Motif-like )

Optionally but without noticeable extra bloat, it can handle drawing filesystem-backed desktop icons and setting a background using a preview-enabled dialog and it can pass non-icon right-clicks through to IceWM. (Perfect for migrating less tech-savvy family members over to IceWM or for getting a right-click launcher menu and desktop icons without resorting to KDE 3 or Xfce)

I would suggest against enabling the 'gnome' USE flag. This enables an internally generated menu scheme which is a great idea, but it isn't doing a very useful job of interpreting the .desktop entries in /usr/share/applications.

My tip for IceWM is to setup the menu with your favourite apps in the same place and use menumaker to generate a program list covering most other things ...
I have /etc/icewm folder with menu, toolbar, preferences etc. An example menu file is